Don Jon (2013)

Don Jon is essentially a coming of age piece about a sex obsessed porn addict.
Starting with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the titular Jon, a man who spends his weeks bouncing between porn and casual sex and then on Sundays he goes to church and asks forgiveness knowing he’s about to repeat his performance.
Jon suddenly has a wake up call when a girl (Barbara, played by Scarlett Johansson) suddenly turns him down, instead of being put off by this he has a large night epiphany that what he really needs is a relationship with this girl.
He gets a date or two and suddenly they’re together but she’s making him wait for sex, telling him that of he went to night school it would be so very sexy (scene almost contains a lapdance) and so he studies and becomes monogamous, but despite Barbara being the girl of Jon’s dreams, he still finds sex disappointing compared to porn.
Barbara makes it clear that it’s porn or her and so Jon takes his addiction underground.
At school Jon meets (Esther, played by Julianne Moore) who catches him watching porn and instead of being outraged she tries giving him a film to watch but he freaks out, but her easy going reaction is a contrast to Barbara’s ever increasingly controlling demands.
Eventually Barbara catches Jon out when she finds all the porn he’s watched in his browser history so they break up and Jon goes back to his former ways, until he ends up sleeping with Esther and realising that what he really wanted all along was a girl he could make love to, where he could lose himself in the act.

Right, where to begin.
It seems that many will under estimate this film, it might be considered an excuse for JGL to get close and personal with Johansson and honestly I didn’t think much else when I first saw it.
Both written and directed by JGL, with the role of Barbara written for Johansson, it’s pretty understandable that people might think this way, but then if you’re writing a fantasy like this, wouldn’t you give it a happy ending at least?
What we really have here is a story about a guy who is really looking for a connection and when he thinks he has that merely based on looks he is soon left disappointed, instead it takes shared moments and honest connection to give him what he was actually looking for.

The film is certainly well done, with a decent cast, good quality production and a plot we could probably all relate to, my only concern is that some people might not really see that with Barbara Jon might get what he wants, but that isn’t what he needs, cause honestly if you were writing your own fantasy, I think most people would have made Barbara a bit less of a force of nature.